"Who Steals My Purse Steals Trash"

I've been re-reading Jack London's The Sea Wolf lately.  The last time I read this, which was also the first time I read this, was about six years ago, as a junior in high school.  (I actually wrote a paper about it, too.)  Last night, I read Chapter XXIV.  In it, there's this conversation between Maud Brewster (the writer who's been rescued/captured by the seal-hunting Ghost) and the captain, Wolf Larsen:

"Why, what can be worse than cutting our throats?" she asked, with pretty naïve surprise. 

"Cutting our purses," he answered.   "Man is so made these days that his capacity for living is determined by the money he possesses."

"'Who steals my purse steals trash,'" she quoted. 

"Who steals my purse steals my right to live," was the reply, "old saws to the contrary.  For he steals my bread and meat and bed, and in doing so imperils my life.  There are not enough soup-kitchens and bread-lines to go around, you know, and when men have nothing in their purses they usually die, and die miserably - unless they are able to fill their purses pretty speedily."

It took me a few minutes, but I finally placed "Who steals my purse steals trash."  It's from Shakespeare's Othello.  (I'm not sure I would have recognized it had I not read Othello just last month.)

At first, I thought that was it.   The writer quotes Shakespeare; I realize it's Shakespeare; woohoo!  But then I got thinking about the context in which this line appears in both works.  In Othello, the purse isn't really the thing that's being talked about.  It functions more as a metaphor:

Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls.
Who steals my purse steals trash.  'Tis something, nothing:
'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands.
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him
And makes me poor indeed (III.iii.159-165) 

As it's brought up in The Sea Wolf, Maud Brewster seems to be arguing for higher things, saying that a purse is merely transitory.  She, like the novel's protagonist Humphrey van Weyden, argues instead for "the immediate jewel of [the] soul."  That's one of the main themes of the novel - van Weyden and Larsen's disagreement about what it is to live.  Van Weyden argues for more esoteric things, and Larsen argues that life is just about surviving for the longest.

Here, Larsen's brutish nature is again illustrated because, regardless of whether you recognize the context of the Shakespeare quote (and the distinction it makes between short-lived things like money and the ongoing life of a reputation), he continues the conversation focused on the black-and-white, have-or-have-not that's central to prolonging life.  I'm not even sure if he recognizes that "Who steals my purse steals trash" is a Shakespeare quote.  If he does, he argues for the purse over reputation or any other higher causes, purposes, or morals.  If he doesn't, he's still just focused on surviving.  He's brutish either way.

But what's more interesting is Maud Brewster's use of this quote in such a normal conversation.  This might be contradictory to my earlier point of how Brewster brings up this choice of purse or reputation, but if she's using this quote simply to describe the sort of economic decisions that occur in seal hunting, it also seems to suggest that she's starting to be affected by Wolf Larsen's brutishness.  She's beginning to focus more on the immediate things rather than the higher level of morals and philosophy, so she uses the quote just because they've been talking about money rather than trying to bring up this discussion of purse-or-reputation to Larsen.  I'm not sure if that's happening to her, but that is what has happened to van Weyden.  When he first came aboard the Ghost, he held himself to those standards, but as the time went by, he started to become more brute-like too.

At the end of the chapter, Larsen does discuss "the worthwhileness of reason" with Brewster and van Weyden in that language of trade:

"You are a blessed, bankrupt pair of fools.  You have no facts in your pocketbook." 

"Yet we spend as freely as you," was Maud Brewster's contribution. 

"More freely, because it costs you nothing." 

"And because we draw upon eternity," she retorted. 

"Whether you do or think you do, it's the same thing.  You spend what you haven't got, and in return you get greater value from spending what you haven't got than I get from spending what I have got, and what I have sweated to get." 

"Why don't you change the basis of your coinage, then?" she queried teasingly. 

He looked at her quickly, half-hopefully, and then said, all regretfully: "Too late.  I'd like to, perhaps, but I can't.  My pocketbook is stuffed with the old coinage, and it's a stubborn thing.  I can never bring myself to recognize anything else as valid."

They're discussing intellectual delight versus emotional delight, which is similar to Shakespeare's purse-or-reputation, but they're still doing it while focused on the physical nature of the purse.  Brewster and van Weyden are arguing for intellectual delight (including the reputation of a name), but they're doing so by using a metaphor of a form of emotional delight - the money in the purse and what it can buy.  This change in diction illustrates that the brutish nature of life on the Ghost has changed them, even if they do hold to their original views.